Lovely idea

I like this idea...

Shapes on Google maps

Google is taking seriously the mission of bringing web apps to the highest level. They just added the possibility to draw shapes on their maps directly from the browser.
I don't know how this could be useful, but it's so cool. You can do things like this:

Nice idea on icons

Wow, a nice new idea on icons introduced by kde 4.0. Take a look at this screencast.

I hope that kde guys will keep innovating with ideas like this.

To Flash or not to Flash?

I've never loved Flash too much. It's a proprietary technology, the player is not available on any platform and it's closed source, it's heavier than plain HTML, it doesn't inter-operate too much with the rest of the system (just think about the cut and paste from Flash...).

In the last weeks, however, I changed a little bit my position especially on one aspect of the web: the video and audio streaming. It is true that Flash is proprietary, but if Adobe provides the player, it just works.

To the opposite, I often have many problems with the proliferation of the audio/video codec. It's a real pain to deal with dozens of codecs: you never know if you have the right one, if you're breaking any patent or if your browser's plugin will support the movie or not.

I really don't understand why Adobe doesn't release the code of the player. It would help a lot the diffusion of Flash and they would have a better product with lesser efforts. I hope this will happens soon.

Xen and the art of making cars

Virtualization. It's the buzz word today. Everybody wants to virtualize, even if they don't know what does that mean. Few days ago Novell announced that BMW group will use SuSE and Xen to consolidate servers and save money.

Ok, I fully agree that you may want to consolidate for many reasons:

• Servers are usually underutilized
• Single point of management
• Live migration
• Saving space in the racks
• Saving money

but I can't agree with this sentence:

The BMW Group is taking advantage of what the market is just discovering, that Xen open source virtualization software fully integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a viable alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions, providing high performance at a lower cost

said by Roger Levy, vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell: the main reason why you want to have an open source virtualization engine is that you simply can't trust enough proprietary solutions to run your servers. It's a matter of trustworthiness and freedom, not a matter of money.

VIew as slideshow

Google made it: now if you receive a powerpoint presentation in gmail, you can see it online without downloading... without even having powerpoint. I'm looking forward to see their web app for creating presentations.

Unfortunately right now there is no support to open document format. I hope to see it sully implemented as soon as possible.

Firefox and Google are closer than before

Firefox Gran Paradiso RC5 is out; the next version of FF will natively support Google's Gears and will share with Google an address blacklist in order to protect user from accessing to sites that host malicious code.

From one point of view, these are good news: Gears is a wonderful technology and protecting the user is always good, but preventing the user from accessing some sites basing on Google's suggestions, is somehow dangerous.

Moreover, gears will make Google even more pervasive in our computers and I'm not sure at all this is good.
It's true that gear is free software and anyone can use it, but until now, only a single application (by Google, btw) uses it, so I think that it is a little too early to support this technology natively.
On the other hand, always being on the edge is what makes you win.

I'm much more concerned about the blacklist. At least I hope that this will be a very visible feature, as the pop-up blocking one, so that the user can clearly see what's going on and can freely decide to visit a site even if it is on the blacklist